Category Archives: Education

The Brazilian government employs IT to enhance its interaction with the citizens as well as improving its administration. The electronic government has considerably improved service delivery. This technology has also created opportunities in the country.

The electronic governance in Brazil, however, has had its fair share of humble beginnings since its commencement in 2000. Only a few institutions and government agencies launched official websites. The sites contained basic information on the company, static links, and the interaction with the users was limited.

After over a decade of the system’s existence, the country’s e-governe has transformed into becoming an example that other nations could emulate. The technology enhanced better interactions with citizens and companies. It also made internal management more efficient, while at the same time offering service delivery and providing information in a more organized way.

Research by Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) indicates that the current number of registered websites under the government domain is 11.856. This number is an indicator of the scope achieved by the electronic government in the country. The large Brazilian territory and its enormous population required this development to access information quickly.

The government websites follow a basic logic. The federal government owns the entity, and therefore the addresses end with gov.br. Addresses belonging to state institutions were registered according to their state domains. For instance, the address of the Central Bank of Brazil is bcb.gov.br.

Services provided by the Brazilian e-governe

Transparency and accountability

The system provides data concerning public expenditure, financial transactions, bids, budget closures, and signing of contracts. This enhances public awareness of the government’s activities, as well as easy supervision of public expenditure.

E-governe health assistance

E-governe has simplified the once difficult task of managing the State and Municipal Health Secretariats. The system has also simplified the process for scheduling appointments, eliminating queues and subsequently improving the quality of service offered to the citizens. E-governe has significantly impacted the constant attention on the health sector.

Requests

The system allows citizens to request public services, check public works schedules, and also to complain about any instances of incompetence. It also offers a direct channel for citizens to communicate with government entities. This eliminates the need for an intermediary who may subject the information to their personal interests.

Platform for discussion

The system offers forums that allow citizens to discuss projects, share ideas on the use of public funds and also present their feedback concerning public service delivery. It opens the discussions initially restricted to the public. This has enabled the achievement of democracy and economic growth.

Registration and other online services

The application of software programs has improved online registration. This service has lowered the public shift costs, time, and workforce. Some of these services include income declaration, criminal background checks, and burglary or theft reports among others.

The Wessex Institute of Technology eLibrary shares many documents that have been published by the WIT. The websites gives users public access to over 28,000 of their peer reviewed scientific articles. The articles are extracted from their research between 1993 and 2016. Their are many options for users to find articles through their advanced search features including: date range, category, book or paper, author, keywords, ISBN number, published year and description.

Users may download their desired content in PDF format. If a user wishes to download a paper, they must pay $38 per published article. Their content includes research areas in: engineering sciences, the built environment, information and communication technologies, ecology and the environment, modeling and simulation, biomedicine and state of the art science and engineering.

The WIT Press is located at the New Forest National Park near Southampton, UK. They have over 30 years of experience in publishing scientific articles. The goal is to keep university students, scientists, engineers and experts in various industries up to date with current research. They also hold international publishing offices in the United States that distributes to all of North America. They offer their works both in digital format and hard copies.

ClassDojo has quickly spread throughout elementary school classrooms since its roll out in 2011. The unique app is premised on making K-8 classrooms more efficient learning environments solely through positive behavioral reinforcement. To date, it’s in use in over 90% of schools nationwide and has received a deluge of positive feedback from both parents and teachers.

An education app geared towards kids

One of the problems the app’s creators sought to solve was the absence of any truly kid-friendly education software for K-8 classrooms. The co-founders, Liam Don and Sam Chaudhary, had interviewed thousands of teachers asking what daily problems they would most like to solve. Don and Chaudhary quickly discovered that children who grew bored or distracted would become disruptive and thus require the teacher to spend valuable class time reigning in those kids who had strayed from the lesson plan. At the same time, the founders noticed that almost all apps available for K-8 education were aimed at the teachers themselves and that there were virtually no apps available that catered to restless students. So they set out to create an app that would not only handle teacher work load but that would also keep kids engaged with the learning environment.

Over time, a child-oriented user interface evolved. Led by a green ninja monster named Mojo, @ClassDojo experience takes children through a riotous, game-like journey where they meet friendly monsters, are met with challenges and are immersed in a new kind of school environment where completing assignments and learning concepts are more akin to leveling up in a video game than the class work of old.

All this is the product of careful design. Both Chaudhary and Don have extensive education backgrounds and were familiar with the work of child psychologists like Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and James Heckman. Using principles derived from both original academic research and the field of game design theory, they set out to create an app that would get kids hooked on learning using the same mechanisms video game developers employ to hook users on their product. The early results are in and it seems to have worked.

ClassDojo has received enthusiastic feedback from teachers across the country. The app has made teacher communications with parents easier and facilitates giving out class assignments, grading work and a host of other tasks. But maybe the most important thing cited by teachers is that it makes learning fun for kids, and keeps them enthralled with learning the whole day through.